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I am conducting a study on the extraction of chemical energy from biological matter through the use of micro-organisms. The end goal of the study is to discover which extraction method is the most effective and produces the highest energy yield.

The first stage of the study is exploring whether more useable energy can produced via the fermentation of 50g of corn with a yeast culture or Methanogenesis of 50g of corn with a methanogenic bacteria culture.

We are having some difficulty obtaining methanogenic cultures. Do any of you know where my school can purchase these cultures in a small volume?

You can contact a lab working on it and they may be able to give you some? Not sure where you are but I helped with a project at the CSIRO in Perth, Australia and they were working on methanogens from bovine stomachs.

Besides the culture do you have a vessel to grow anaerobic Archaea? You can build one pretty easily, but it will be very necessary for all methanogens.

This link is to a paper about BMP, which is what you are doing, bio methane potential test. It has in it a crude diagram for an anaerobic container and measuring apparatus.

Our lab got our anaerobic methanogens from a scraping of a cow intestine, but often if you just put matter like poultry litter or farming crop waste into an anaerobic condition then methanogens will eventually come to dominate giving you a culture to sample from.

It also takes a little while to get a healthy reactor going. Its way way slower than the process for fermenting with yeasts. There is a volatile fatty acid phase (very smelly) then the methanogen phase. Once a reactor has gotten to the methanogen phase then it can be fed raw material to produce methane directly.

Our lab works on the question your students are working on, but its not which method produces the most yield. It's about doing both methods to completely extract all the carbon energy. You extract your ethanol or lipids and then feed the anaerobic reactor with whats left over to make methane, maximizing energy production.

Yes most definitely. The ethanol content of the corn will max out around 14-17% depending on your strain of yeast. After that the left over mash has a lot of carbon left that can produce methane.

If your interested. After all the methane has been made the left over liquid "effluent" makes a great fertilizer. It will be heavy in nitrogen and phosphorus. It can directly be fed to growing corn or any crop to provide almost all the extra nutrition. ->fermentation->methane->fertilizer->crop->fermentation repeat

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Also, growing a pure culture of these guys is NOT trivial. They need anoxic conditions, which in my experience has meant using anoxic chambers (a sealed jar with an oxygen scavenger packet inside) and an anoxic source (lab grade N2 is easy) to push out the oxygen.

That's what i have been reading in journals but my school doesn't have those resources so we are trying to simplify.